Blue Rose
by Ten-Faced
Summary: A bodyguard. It's the perfect position to kill someone. Jason manages to trick everyone and becomes close to Piper, but, as usual, love messes everything up. In love and loved by the princess he was supposed to kill, Jason's organized life suddenly turns upside down in a whirl of politics, scandal, and betrayal. The results? Find out.
1. Jason I

Eternal disclaimer: I owe nothing for the rest of this fic.

* * *

Even from here, Jason could hear them. The crowd, out there sitting in their seats, pounding their feet against the dirt ground and calling for blood, for entertainment. He lifted a cracked mug to his lips and swallowed, letting the cool water run down his slightly parched throat and hydrate him.

"Your helmet, sir," his attendant told him politely, handing him the headgear that could save him from death or serious injury. Nodding, Jason set aside the cup, took the worked metal and slipped it over his blond hair, making sure it was fit before taking out his golden coin from his pocket.

The servant stepped back as Jason flipped it into the golden sword, and caught it neatly.

A few experimental twirls, stabs in the air, and some movement to warm his muscles up, and he was ready. A nod to the servant, and he understood, opening the door.

The attendant led him down the dark corridor, pausing at the doors to go and whisper to the gate-guards to get ready. Jason waited until the gates opened, pouring the lights of Apollo's chariot into the dark underground, and walked out.

Heart pounding, Jason stepped into the arena, where he was met with a roar of welcome from the audience, all hungry for blood.

Whether it was for his, or his opponents, it didn't matter for them. Audiences were like that, loving the winners with adoration to rival the worship for gods, but when any of the special, 'love-of-their-lives' happened to lose, then the fighters would be pushed to the back of their minds, forgotten in the dust for a new person to fawn over.

He allowed one frown at the repetitive nature before he smoothed his face over again, and gripped his golden sword.

Pity for the other opponents. Unlike them, he knew how to play the crowd. And he had a reason to win, a reason far more important than the rest of theirs put together.

A pair of colour-shifting kaleidoscope eyes flashed in his mind, warming his heart, just a little.

Facing the other man in armour, he waited for Octavian to give the signal. Sneering, the other blond man did so.

"Begin!"

Jason charged, a blur of gold and metal.

* * *

_One Year__ ago_

* * *

A teenage boy around fifteen years of age stood in line, near the entrance of the city where guards were examining people and letting them past the gates. He had on a ragged, dirty cloak, with travel-worn clothing and a dusty pack on his back. Beneath the thinned hood, blond hair could be seen, the longer strands occasionally poking him in his sky-blue eyes. Currently, he stood behind a stuttering old woman, who was murmuring her excuses about her daughter giving birth. The guard looked bored.

"Next," the guard droned, waving past the old woman who hobbled into the city. "Name, reasons why you're coming, and identification."

"Jason Grace," the blond boy answered easily. "I'm here to try out for the Warrior competition that His Highness was holding. Uh, here's my-"

Jason sounded like a country kid, unsure and blabbing about himself, still thinking that everything would work out like a fairy tale. It was perfect. The guard barely glanced at the wooden tablet before waving him past the gate. "Next."

"Thank you, sir," he said, nothing in his voice betraying any of his real emotions. Only gratefulness could be heard as Jason slipped past.

If his sources were right (and he knew they were) then the sign-up for the tournament would be at the biggest building in the western part of the city. He had studied all the maps, of the main streets, the side alleys, and even some of the secret tunnels, and knew the city like the back of his hand.

Jason still went up and asked for directions, nodding in confirmation to the kind people passing by, and thanking them politely for the information he already knew. If anyone who didn't know him saw him, they would have thought that he was a new person to the city, someone who wanted to get a new future. That was the way he planned to keep it.

Grinning at the man in charge of writing down challengers, Jason took the carved tablet confirming his participation in the tournament, and followed the other men who had signed up (from now on, they were simply the opponents, that he would have to cut down. No names were needed) to their dorms.

It was a small room, but he wouldn't have to share, and there was a window and a bed. Surprisingly better than he had expected. Jason threw his bag onto the foot of his bed, and sat heavily on the hard mattress.

Phase one complete.

A soft knock rapped against the wooden door.

"Yes?" Jason asked, not getting off the bed. _Keep up the farce, the charade, and ensure that no one suspects who you truly are. You are a country boy, someone who has no special skills currently._

A servant woman popped her head in. "Supper starts in ten minutes!" she told him cheerfully. "Just make your way down to the main hall, alright?"

"Thank you," he smiled at her, knowing the effects it would have.

It hit her much harder than he had thought. Blushing and giggling, the girl sent a dazed smile to him before shutting the door.

Greeks.

He stood up, pausing to check if his coin was in his pocket (it was) before stretching and exiting the room.

Time to scope out the enemy.

* * *

Loud, chaotic, dirty, and dark. That was his thoughts on the main hall. Hiding the wrinkling of his nose, Jason grabbed a plate and sat anywhere, ignoring the loud people roaring on about something or another, and stuffed the surprisingly good stew and bread into his mouth. For a moment, he let the savory flavours roll around on his tongue, relaxing.

A commotion, particularly loud and disruptive even here, caught his eye. Two large men had stood up suddenly, knocking down both the benches and the people that had been sitting on them, and were snarling at each other.

"Oh _yeah_?" One man yelled into his friend/enemy's face. Jason chewed, and swallowed, still studying the two. Both men looked like gorillas, a creature he had seen once when an odd travelling circus had come in for entertainment. They looked dumber than the gentle creatures, and more violent, with a tad bit more hair, but other than that, they were a dead ringer.

"Duh, _yeah_!" the other man yelled back, gross spittle flying everywhere.

"What are they fighting about?" he whispered to no one in particular.

The guy sitting next to him decided to answer, anyways. "Probably about who'll win the competition."

Jason took a good look at the man who had answered. Blond hair, sharp gray eyes, and lean muscles. Jason instantly put down this guy as a potential threat.

He knew better than to act like it, though. "Name's Jason," he grinned at him, an attempt to be friendly.

His acquaintance nodded back. "Malcolm."

"Nice to meet you."

"Thanks, you too."

It went back to silent chewing for the both of them, letting themselves be drowned out by the loud yells and occasional breaks of the pottery.

Scraping the last bit of the vegetable stew into his mouth, Jason stood with the plates and began to walk over to the servants at the counter serving and taking dishes when one of the gorillas finally broke.

"No one insults my mother!" he yelled, and smashed the plate onto the other gorilla's head.

Sharp sounds of breaking pottery. Sudden smell of blood, yells of shock, guards coming in. Jason's head took on a familiar system, categorizing everything surrounding him as he surveyed the potential danger.

If the guards, or anyone did not get this situation under control, something seriously bad could happen. There were two guards, and Jason was pretty sure they weren't going to be able to take on the murderous gorilla. He knew he was more than capable of taking him down.

On the other hand, Jason was supposed to stay inconspicuous. Normal people did not charge heroically into a fight and break it up methodically.

Well, that settled things. The mission was more important. Jason handed his plate to the servant, and then stepped closer to the wall, watching as the smaller satyrs hired as guards came running in to try and stop the rumble. They were doing rather miserable jobs of it, and it seemed like this would go on for hours-

"_FREEZE_!"

Every living thing in the large room did exactly that; they froze, not daring to breath. Jason turned his head a fraction of an inch to the direction where the command had come from.

A large woman stood at the entrance of the room, and she was scowling menacingly at the lot of them. It really did not help that she had about a dozen weapons strapped to her armoured, beefy body, or the fact that she was bigger than the rest of them.

"What," she gritted out. "Is this?"

One of the servants ran up and whispered something, which the woman crouched down to hear for the shorter girl. "I see," she answered, and as she looked down at the girl, Jason saw something similar to tenderness in her face.

Whatever that was, it vanished the second she looked up. "You worthless maggots!" she screamed, and Jason swore, later, that all the birds in the trees fell silent and flew away as fast as they could. "What are you, some cheap, D-rate soldiers?"

"No," the entire room mumbled like little children being scolded.

"Well?" she demanded, and then took a deep breath, calming slightly. The keyword being 'slightly'.

"You are all here to fight," she began. "But _this_, this is not the time, nor the place. All of you have come to prove yourself good enough to be members of the Royal Guards, have you not?"

"Yeah!" the men in the room cheered back.

"I didn't say you could speak!" she snapped, and the men closest to her flinched. By closest, he meant about a ten-yard radius around her. "Prove that you are fit to be proud members of the Royal Guards, not some brawling gutless street trash!"

Jason was pretty impressed. This woman was almost _Roman_, in the way that she commanded everyone. For a Greek, she wasn't half bad.

"Get back to what you were doing," she ordered, her voice not giving any room for arguments. "And the next person to start such a thing gets ten lashes."

The men did, albeit much more quietly and calmly. Rolling his eyes, Jason left the dining hall.

* * *

"P-please don't…"

"Shut up, slut."

"I'm _not_ a slut!"

The sound of a harsh slap. "I said shut up!"

Whimpers.

Should he intervene? Jason didn't really want to risk the mission and end up losing the one person he really cared about, but he felt sorry for the servant girl.

Of course, if a masked person happened to come across the sight and be a hero, there really was no way anyone would think it was him, would they? Besides, Thalia would want him to save the girl.

Jason grabbed the hooded cloak and wrapped it around his head tightly. Grabbing the issued practice sword made out of wood instead of his magic coin, he slipped out silently from the door, and slunk to the bend in the hallway, where he saw the large man from earlier holding one of the younger servant girls to the wall, a hairy rough hand covering her mouth.

He didn't like people who abused their powers. This man was abusing his strengths against a young girl who could have been his daughter. Therefore, Jason had some kind of an excuse to help the young maidservant.

Jason smashed the flat of his wooden sword at the side of his head, and the man crumpled, not expecting the hit.

The girl squeaked in surprise as her harasser collapsed on her. Jason yanked her out from under the heavy meatbag, and gestured at her to leave quickly. She did so, not wanting to stick around. Smart of her.

Grunting slightly, Jason hefted the man onto his shoulders, and walked to the far window, where he threw the unconscious man out of the opening. He landed in what looked like a thorn bush. Ouch.

Dusting his hands of invisible dirt, Jason made his way back to his room, careful to make sure no one noticed him, and quietly closed the door. He piled the wooden sword and a few other things against the door in a way that would make a lot of noise if anyone tried to come in secretly, and lay back down on his bed, making sure to remove his hood.

Throwing the cloak/headscarf against the wall on the other side of the room, Jason closed his eyes and fell asleep almost instantly. He had a big day ahead of him tomorrow, and he'd prefer to be well-rested.

* * *

I was listening to a song, and reading Lulunoel's **Unmatched** (check it out, folks), when this idea hit me. The first person to correctly guess which song I was listening to gets a fic with a pairing of their choice dedicated to them.

As I'm sure you all know, this is AU. It'll also be updated slowly, but I have about seven other fics to juggle around, so bear with me, and if you can, check them out too. Oh, and vote on my poll, would you? Reviews are appreciated, thank you for reading!


	2. Piper I

The golden sun chariot driven by Apollo and pulled by his horses raced across the worn tracks of his path in the sky, letting the light shine on everything and dispelling the faint false light of dawn and the remaining darkness from the previous night. Rays of bright, golden light carrying heat and warmth shone across the world, waking people rich and poor, strong and weak, male and female to face another day. It was both the promise of a new start and the beginning of another repetitive pattern in their lives.

Some of those beams shone through the window belonging to the bedchamber of a certain princess in the palace, and pestered her closed eyes, trying to tug her out of the gentle grasps of Hypnos.

In other words, the sun had risen and she was waking up.

"Nngh?" she murmured into the pillow and shifted so that the light wouldn't bother her anymore. Once the sun was out of her eyes, she let out a sigh of satisfaction and closed them again, trying to regain the blessings of slumber.

Of course, then she remembered just what she was supposed to be doing.

"Yargh!" Piper, only daughter of King Tristan and a girl who had promised to meet her friend by the eighth hour, ripped off the blankets and dashed out of her bed, running to the basin filled with water and hastily washing away all traces of sleep.

Her maid, sleeping on the other side of the room in a smaller cot, also woke with a start. "Oh, gods, princess, I'm so sorry!" she cried, also hastily getting out and straightening everything.

Piper waved away the apology, already grabbing a white _chiton_ and stepping behind the changing screen. "Oh, dear gods!" she moaned, stuffing herself into the piece of clothing. "Annabeth is going to kill me!"

Her maid didn't disagree; she knew all too well just how fierce the noble-blooded blonde was.

As soon as Piper stepped out from behind the curtains, her maid sprinkled perfume – the really weird one sent over by the really weird Egyptians – right into her face. Then, while she tried to collect herself, rub her eyes, curse and expel the offensive material out of her mouth all at the same time, Lacy reached over and quickly braided her hair down into a braid.

"All set!" she chirped and then frowned as she re-inspected Piper's face, picking out flaws that she spotted. "Actually…."

"_No_, you may _not_ cake my face with makeup when my life is in crisis!" she wasn't over exaggerating. Not by much, anyways.

"Just a little?"

"_No_, Lacy."

Her young maid pouted and with difficulty Piper restrained herself from letting the younger girl do whatever she wanted to do. "We're going to be late!" she pointed out, but crumbled at the continued begging look Lacy was giving her. "Maybe next time?" she suggested weakly.

She regretted the words as soon as they slipped out of her mouth. "I'll hold you to that, princess!" Lacy gasped, excited, and ran out the door to the kitchen.

Piper opened her mouth to take back her words, thought about it for a few seconds and then closed her mouth without saying a single thing on the subject. Lacy was only trying to be helpful in the best way she knew and it would be terrible to kill her excitement.

Instead she reopened her mouth and yelled at her maid's retreating figure to bring her the dried figs for breakfast. Then, she began to ransack her room to jog her memory and find the dagger she had hidden somewhere in her room. Annabeth had given it to her and both she and Lacy had been hiding it in different places around her chambers every week. It was a big room and she couldn't force Lacy to clean everything on her own.

Piper patted the sheets with both her hands. She could have _sworn_ that she had changed her hiding place to under her bed . . . .

* * *

"You're late," Annabeth told her, arms crossed over her chest in clear annoyance. Her own dagger hung on a thick cord tied to her belt and was slightly hidden in the folds of her white chiton.

Piper was too busy trying to gulp air back into her deprived lungs to answer properly. Besides her, Lacy was only in slightly better shape, muscles experienced with work and some exercise. After finding her dagger the two of them had run through the paths overgrown with bushes trying to make it on time.

Obviously, they had failed.

"Seriously? This is the fifth time!"

"I'm…" she managed to get her lungs to work. "Sorry."

"You should be," Annabeth told her. "I'm beginning to think that you don't want to do this after all."

Piper shook her head, but she was still trying to breath and couldn't defend herself with her own words. Not that it would have really made a difference. Annabeth was not only a good fighter, but she had a clever and wise mind behind her pretty face. Piper was quite jealous of the noble's blond daughter sometimes.

Behind them, Lacy was trying to catch her breath as well, having even a harder time because of her smaller frame. "At least," she huffed, straightening herself. "She's not trying to kill us."

"Don't tempt me," Annabeth warned, but she cracked a smile. Lacy was hard not to like.

Piper sighed, and pulled out the hidden blade. "Can we just get started?" she pleaded.

"Fix your grip!" Annabeth ordered. "And no; not until you go through all the exercises."

Piper's fingers rearranged themselves until they were at the grip that Annabeth had shown her, over and over again. "Better?" she asked about her grip.

"Move your first finger closer to the hilt."

And another session of secret lessons on mastering how to use the knife _properly_ began.

* * *

"You've improved," Annabeth admitted at the end of the session when she had her dagger against Piper's throat after three minutes of sparring. "But you still need work."

Coming from Annabeth, that was the best she'd get. "Thanks."

"Alright, now get going before the king decides to send an army after you."

Piper sheathed her dagger and let it hang from the cord hidden under her clothes. "He wouldn't do that!" she protested.

"You're right," Annabeth had her face perfectly straight. "He'd probably just send a company. Nothing too big. Just his elite warriors, the ones who have absolutely no mercy, you know? Kill first, ask questions later. If I didn't know better, I'd think that they were Roman."

"Oh, shut up," Piper said crossly while Lacy stifled a giggle. "He wouldn't send his guards after me. Not when new ones are being added to the ranks. Until they prove their loyalties, every man is on full duty."

Around this time of the year, when they were recruiting more soldiers and warriors, the king's personal guards were not allowed to return home. Instead, they stayed at the palace grounds, watching over the new recruits to make sure that no one untested were within shouting distance of the king and his family.

Of course, they often missed the princess sneaking out to the gardens, but she wouldn't complain about that too much.

"Speaking of newbies, did you hear?" Annabeth leaned in. "One of the men trying out for the guard position were found tangled up in the roses. Katie threw a fit, because he was ruining everything, but then they found out that he was trying to rape one of the maids when someone threw him out the window."

Lacy made the sign against evil. Piper didn't, but she felt cold, anyways. "So what happened to him?"

"He got kicked out after ten lashes from Clarisse," Annabeth shrugged. "Good thing, too. He wouldn't have made a good soldier here."

"Who was the maid?"

"Silena wouldn't tell me, but from the way she was acting, yelling about how she wanted to castrate the guy with a dull, rusty knife, I'd say it's one of the younger ones."

Piper almost felt sorry for the guy. The Head Maid, Silena, was no pushover when it came to her fellow maids. Many men had fled the palace, trying to evade her fury at them for touching her adopted sisters. Almost.

Lacy seemed more interested in the saviour of this story rather than the man who had ended up in the rosebush. "Who was the hero? Was he good looking?"

"Silena chose to withhold that piece of information from me so it's either someone she's got an eye on, or she doesn't know."

Lacy pouted and whined, but it was obvious Annabeth actually did not know anything about him. Finally, she gave up, dejected, and muttered to herself that she was going to question every single one of the maids till someone answered her and described just how good looking he was.

"You can do that while we work," Annabeth finally put her dagger away, hiding it beneath a fold in her chiton. "Ready for weaving?"

Piper made a face. She was decent enough at the 'art' of weaving, but the Fates always placed her right next to Annabeth, who was practically the goddess of weaving. Such were the benefits of those that followed Athena with the devotion Annabeth had. Weaving was also the one area that Annabeth was modest in, always talking down on her work. Maybe that was just because she didn't want to make the same mistakes Arachne made, but Piper thought it was rather unfair that she wouldn't acknowledge just how good she really was in weaving.

"Ready as I'll ever be," Piper tried to look excited. She really did. Every woman available had to weave, sure, as early as possible, but that didn't mean the same old movements, the same old threads weaving in and out didn't get boring after a while, and weaving always took much more than just 'a while'.

Lacy was a bit more excited, mostly because the weaving room was a woman-only room where gossip ran around like excited air sprites. "Yes!"

"Good. Let's go," Annabeth began to make her way, automatically assuming the leading role to the room where the kingdom's lifeblood all started. The room with the biggest gossips.

Piper didn't mind Annabeth taking the lead. She was a natural-born leader, with charisma, wisdom, and just the general likeable aura. The older girl was actually her role model.

The only problem was the weaving. Gah.

* * *

"Gah," Piper groaned as she cracked her knuckles, blatantly ignoring the protests from Lacy. "I don't care if my fingers grow thick, Lacy, that feels good."

"But think of how ugly they'll be!" she wailed.

"Who cares?" Piper wanted to sleep. She had, amazingly, finished weaving a length of cloth long enough to be a captain's cape. Of course, Annabeth had finished her owl tapestry, and outshone everyone in the room once again. It wasn't that she was jealous of her talented friend . . . it was more like she envied her.

Her dislike for the art of weaving was growing daily. That was bad, because when she was married off, she'd be expected to teach the same to her daughters and lead the daily weaving activities with the female parts of the household.

She wondered if she'd be allowed to take Annabeth with her when a suitor was finally chosen by her father. The blonde would certainly be a great help and a valuable asset if her future husband recognized her potential, even as a woman.

Piper snorted, and rolled over in her bed. Fat chance of that. All men just seemed to think that women had no brains sometimes, with the way they acted all superior. She heard that it was getting better in Rome where they had actually elected a female praetor for the first time in history, but she doubted they were as feminist as the Hunters of Artemis or the Amazons. Both were known for being ruthless to males should they feel that they were being threatened. The stories one heard were terrifying, actually. Men getting their limbs cut off to resemble pigs, shot with poisoned arrows, bled to death . . . .

Piper would have joined one, perhaps. . . but she had a duty. To her country, her people, and her father. And those duties required for her to be a good, obedient princess.

The lessons with the knife didn't count. That was in case she was in danger.

Still, she liked to imagine what would have happened if she had joined. Not lasted long, most likely, but it was nice to daydream about different lives.


	3. Jason II

Jason decided that he did not like Greeks.

For one, the lazy people didn't seem to take their work seriously. While he and the rest of the men training were wrestling and sparring under the eyes of the instructors with more seniority over them, the maids flocked to the yard and giggled as they loitered around.

Didn't Greek women do anything productive? Jason scowled and allowed himself to show a weak spot in his stance to support his story of being a simple farm boy seeking chances in the fancy city where the king lived in his precious palace. His opponent, unfortunately, failed to catch that point and continued to focus most of his attacks on his most obviously defended side.

Dear gods.

Their instructor whistled and gestured at the two of them. "You two!" he snapped. "Get over here!"

Dusting his hands and wiping it on the edge of his tunic, he did so. "Make that stance again," their instructor ordered him.

Having a pretty good idea of just what was coming to him, Jason made the same stance with the same opening again. With a nervous look plastered on his face, he waited.

The trainer lunged and it took all of Jason's self-control not to block the coming hit or leap back to dodge. The older man lashed out and slammed into the unprotected side of his stance and knocked him down onto the ground easily.

"When your opponent shows an opening," their instructor snapped at his sparring partner as Jason got back up, amplifying his expression of pain. "Take it and use it. Let their stupidity and carelessness be the cause of their downfall."

Well, yes, those were the basics, but there was also a chance that the opening was nothing but a fake to lure them in. Jason supposed that this would be taught once everyone had mastered the basics.

If not . . . well then, the Greeks' slim chance against the Romans had just gone down to no chance at all.

"Try that again," the trainer barked. Biting back a sigh of annoyance Jason and his partner began to circle each other, looking for openings. He left a few open and mercifully the moron that he was unfortunate enough to be partnered with pounced on it enough times to satisfy the trainer.

In the end, Jason had landed more blows on his partner, but it was a very close tie and his fellow trainee blamed it on the gods, luck, the wind, his stomach ache and everything but his incompetence.

He just agreed to whatever the idiot said, in hopes of shutting him up.

During the water break, Jason learnt just why the female servants were gathered around the training area.

"Who do you think it is?" murmured one of the girls there, tugging on a strand of hair and scanning the men lining up for a drink of water and a chance to rest their sore muscles. "Whoever it is, he has to be buff to have rescued her from that terrible, terrible man."

"And good looking," giggled another. "He was so _brave_!"

What looks had to do with courage or strength, Jason really didn't know. He drank half of the water in the ladle handed to him before dumping the rest onto his head, letting the liquid flow down and cool his heated scalp. It felt nice.

"Alright!" roared the woman from yesterday, whose name was apparently Clarisse. She was the only woman in here, but she was definitely a leader. He felt a sort of a grudging respect for her. It must have been hard for her, being a woman in a society mostly dominated by men and yet she was holding her own without a sign of any struggles she may have felt on her hard path. "I want all you maggots to change! Those that were practicing swordplay, get your lazy asses to the wrestling stations _now_! Wrestlers, pick up your damned swords and _move_!"

She reminded him of a friend of his, in her no-nonsense attitude. Handing the ladle back to the brown haired girl in charge of the water bucket with quietly spoken words of gratitude, he quickly grabbed his wooden sword and made his way over to the swordplay stations. This, he told himself, was where he had to be extra careful and stick to his cover no matter what obstacle was thrown in the way of his mission.

His cover was that he was a peasant boy with a yet-unfound gift for swordplay. While he trained, mixed in their ranks, the Greeks would see his potential and train him to take a high-ranking position. He would become a guard for an important Greek and would then assassinate that person before staging it to look like an attack from one of their own.

Greece would be thrown into civil unrest, possibly war, and then he would return to Rome with his mission completed.

It was a good plan, even if Octavian had been the one to come up with it.

Jason gripped his sword and it took quite the conscious effort to hold it in the rookie, beginner way he hadn't used since he was a very, very young boy far too long ago. His fingers twitched, his muscles protesting at the wrong way the hilt of the sword felt.

There was, of course, the chance of the plan going wrong and him being captured, but he was ready for that. The Romans were anything if not careful, and agents had already killed off a real farm boy named Jason that shared his physical traits after convincing the real Greek Jason to try his chance as a guard at the royal palace. If he was caught – and here Jason was confident that he would never be discovered – he would antagonize the guards into beating his face before killing himself.

To the Greeks, he would be a home-grown terrorist. Maybe a farm boy promised something by his liege lord to turn against the heart of the Greek power. The Romans would be far from the top suspects on this list.

The instructors began to go around correcting grips. The one that reached him first happened to be quite friendly and – Jason had to ransack his vocabulary to find a word that described him best – nice. "See, that's not how you want to hold your sword," the older male told him kindly. "Shift your fingers a bit more together and make this shape – yes, that's it."

Jason let his face slip into wonder. "It feels more steady now," he said.

"Steadier," the man corrected his grammar. "And that's good. Don't ever hold it in the other way, or your hands will remember the wrong grip. It's important that you get good habits, because in battle things are unpredictable and you never know when you'll get the chance to take a breath."

Nice? Sure, it described this Greek. Boring? Babying? Overly-obsessive? Smothering? Definitely.

Luckily the nice guy moved on to spread his lesson. Making a few experimental jabs, Jason couldn't help but notice just how out of balance the whittled piece of wood was in his hand. Hopefully the Greeks weren't cheap to the point where they would have their soldiers fight with wooden weapons, or the men currently in training – and he – would suffer from confusion and discomfort when they switched to the real blades.

His opponent was a youth who could be called a man if he stretched it. He was taller than Jason, with a confident, arrogant swagger. Jason noticed that he was one of the candidates to the masked hero.

He couldn't imagine why. "I'm gonna beat you good, punk," the Greek sneered and it took all of Jason's self control to not do something he would regret – like break his hand with the wooden sword.

Instead he took on a nervous stance. Reserved farm boy, fresh dreams, confused about hostility – after all, 'city folks' had this stereotype about those from the country and often considered them stupid even when there was evidence proving otherwise – who would awaken his gift for swordplay.

Jason couldn't have asked for a better entrance to his 'new life'.

When the whistle blew he put up a few parries and waited until his opponent began to tire and get frustrated. He let the first few openings pass him before taking the fifth one to strike. He hit the unprotected left ribs perfectly with the wooden blade.

His sparring partner let out a high-pitched yelp of pain and froze in his tracks. One of the overseers nodded as he watched.

Hidden behind a bewildered and concerned mask Jason smiled.

Later, when the trainers separated him and a few others into a different section he wasn't surprised at having made the cut. He acted like it, though.

His acting was perfect and no one even suspected it.

* * *

In this night's dinner the official guards joined them in the dining hall, as instructed by the rotating meal schedule. Jason didn't see the point on changing the order of groups eating, which then proved his point that Greeks expended valuable energy on useless actions.

The guards were loose-lipped enough without the spirits in them, and once the drinks got flowing words were slipping out from tired, willing mouths set in reddening faces like a waterfall. A few cracked some jokes with punch lines that could have been considered treason, and everyone laughed without a care.

"And the princess," the latest joker continued, rubbing his elbow. He had hit a bowl of hot stew while recounting a particularly wild story involving three geese and a half-blind old woman. The story had required intense, over-exaggerated hand gestures which proved to be harmful to the storyteller. He had sobered up now, and was giving advice to his juniors. "She's quite the handful."

"Why?" one of the newer initiates asked, a question only vocalized by one but thought by many.

The more experienced soldiers began to mumble and roll their eyes. "She's perfected the art of slipping away unnoticed," one of them complained. "One minute she's there, talking to a friend or a maid about her 'unrivalled hate for weaving' and the next minute she's seen on the other side of the palace running around in the garden."

A maiden who evaded and abandoned her guards and hated to weave or stay in one place for long? Jason knew the type, though he had only seen a few in Roman noble families, where the daughters were rebellious and fought for their daydream's version of 'freedom'.

His friend Reyna had a good head. She may have fought for her rights and freedom, but she did so in a realistic and professional way that left no one with the chance to argue against her rising to power. She was responsible. Everything about her screamed responsibility. That was why he appreciated her friendship so much.

As for the Greek princess, though. . . . this was reckless, not to mention dangerous, very high-risk and almost stupid for the only princess of a country. Granted, the king's nephew was the heir to the throne but the princess still had value as a woman with her Greek royal blood flowing in her veins. Such carelessness both intrigued and amused him. Greeks and their 'yearn for liberty'. None of them ever realized that everyone was a caged bird in this world.

Reyna knew it. She had taken control of the cage's state.

He knew it. He made himself useful and hard to replace. He made himself valuable as a caged bird and made it seem like he had changed himself and his beliefs to survive, just like his sister had wanted him to.

"All I'm sayin' is," the guard concluded and took a swig of his watered-down spirit. Jason's stomach twisted in recognition of the way wine was drunk back in Rome. Here, it seemed the Greeks did this to both earn profit and keep the guards from suffering from hangovers in the morning after. "Whichever one of you suckers get landed with the princess, you better prepare yourself for a game of tag you can't ever win."

What an interesting challenge. A game of tag?

Jason always won tag. Perhaps his mission objective could be focused onto the princess . . . .

After all, there never was a target easier than one that liked to escape their own safety.


End file.
